“NOT GUILTY BY ASSOCIATION” ROMANS 3: 19-36, 4: 1-3, 5: 1-2
ROMANS 3: 19-20, 21-26; 4: 1-3; 5: 1-2.
PLEASE OPEN YOUR BIBLE TO ROMANS 3.
As we read the Book of Romans we find there is no one who saw so clearly the evil of human nature as Paul did; but it must always be noted that the evil of human nature was to Paul, not a call to hopelessness, but a challenge to hope.
When we saw that Paul believed in original sin, when we say that he believed in the depravity of human nature, we must never take that to mean that Paul despaired of human nature, or that he looked on it with cynical contempt.
Once when William Jay was an old man, he said: “My memory is failing, but there are two things that I must never forget—that I am a great sinner, and that Jesus Christ is a great Savior.”
Paul never under-rated the redeeming power of Jesus Christ. Paul believed men without Christ to be bad, but he never believed men too bad to be saved. He was confident that what Christ had done for him He could do for any man.
Our postmodern culture has wreaked havoc on the idea of guilt. If there is no real standard for right and wrong, and I do something that I consider right---even if others consider it wrong---then there is nothing about which to feel guilty, right? If one holds to a postmodern worldview, then that statement is true. But one question remains: Then why do I feel guilty?
No amount of blaming our guilty feelings on the cultural and moral bias in which we were raised can alleviate that internal sense of guilt that still haunts us.
The greater question is: How do we get rid of our guilt? People have tried to remove their guilt, through rationalizing it away, doing acts of penance, and doing more good works than bad. Nevertheless, their guilt remains. This study readily acknowledges our guilt and points us to the only solution for the removal of our guilt---being justified by Christ.
There were in Paul’s day, and there are today, two opposite views about how to be accepted as righteous before God. One view is that people are accepted as righteous only as they become righteous. This was Paul’s view before his conversion. When Paul encountered Christ he discovered that God accepted him as righteous even though he had sinned----even to the point of persecuting the Lord and His church. He began to preach that God accepts sinners as righteous when they trust Jesus.
Opponents of Paul’s view claim that the person justified by faith will never become truly righteous. Paul saw justification as only the initial step in being saved. Sanctification follows, and it involves being transformed into the image of Christ. This leads to glorification, when we are like Jesus. But at no point in this process can a Christian take credit for his or her being righteous: righteousness is by God’s grace from beginning to end.
PLEASE READ ROMANS 3: 19-20.
In vs. 20 Paul is quoting rather freely from Ps. 143: 2. These verses come at the end of a long section on the universal reality of sin. Romans 1: 18-32 reveals the sins of the Gentile world. Rom. 2:1-3:9 focuses on the sins of Jews. Romans 3: 19-20 summarizes the universal tragedy and reality of human sin.
In the first part of vs. 19, Paul was still focusing on the Jews. Earlier in Rom. 2: 14 he wrote that Gentiles have a kind of inner law, but only the Jews had the written law. The message of the law was spoken to those under the law. Paul was thinking not only of the books of Law but also of other O.T. books.
He had just completed a long string of quotations from some of these other books in vs. 10-18. According to Phil 3: 6, 9 Paul had believed that righteousness was to be achieved through keeping the law. Now he had come to believe that the supreme problem of life is, “How can a man get into a right relationship with God? How can a man feel at peace, at ease, at home with God?” “How can a man escape the feeling of estrangement and fear in the presence of God?”
The older religion of Judaism, answered: “A man can attain a right relationship with God by keeping meticulously all that the law lays down. If he fulfils all the works of the law, he will be right with God.”
But to say that is simply to say that there is no possibility of any man ever attaining to that relationship with God. No man ever can keep or ever will keep every commandment of the law. Simply because man is an imperfect creature he can never render a perfect obedience. No man can ever render a perfect service to the infinite perfection of God. So man cries out “Not the labors of my hands can fulfill thy Law’s demands.”
What then is the use of the Law? The use of the Law is that it makes a man aware of sin. It is only when a man knows what he ought to do that he can realize that he is not doing it. It is only when a man knows the Law and tries to satisfy it that he realizes he can never satisfy it.
The Law is designed to show a man his own weakness and his own sinfulness. Is a man then shut out from God? Far from it, because the way to God is not the way of Law, but the way of grace. It is not the way of works; it is the way of faith.
All men are guilty before God. Therefore, all are condemned and under wrath. If there is no fear of God in the heart, there will not be obedience to God in life. Ungodliness leads to unrighteousness. Both alike are the objects of God’s holy wrath.
The person who does not know God through faith in Jesus Christ stands before God in a state of condemnation. The plight of unregenerate humanity is the depravity of the moral nature. Man is utterly impotent to save himself. His supreme need is the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
2 PLEASE READ ROMANS 3: 21-26.
Romans 3:21 begins with “But now,” and we may be grateful for these two words. They mark a turning point in Paul’s discussion. Having exposed the sinfulness of men in Romans 1: 18 to 3: 20, Paul now turned to declare the grace of God in Romans 3:21 to 8: 39.
As the former passage depicted man’s bondage to sin, so the latter proclaimed his deliverance from sin. Thus at this point Paul returned to the theme of his letter introduced in Romans 1: 16-17, namely, the revelation of the righteousness of God. No finer presentation of the gospel of God’s grace is found anywhere in the New Testament. In Romans 3:21-31 Paul set forth the heart of the gospel as he had both experienced and proclaimed it.
As a devout Pharisee, Paul had believed that he could achieve a right standing with God through keeping the law. Thus, in Gal. 1:14 he was extremely zealous for the traditions of the fathers. In Phil 3: 6 he claimed that he was blameless with regard to righteousness under the law. However, his encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus radically changed all this.
No longer did Paul depend upon his obedience to the law as the basis for his acceptance with God. Rather, in Phil. 3: 7 those features of Jewish heritage and boasting that had formerly been his “gain,” he now counted “as loss.” Gladly he forfeited them for Christ’s sake. Thus he declared, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found of him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.”
When God confronts us in the gospel of Jesus Christ, He does not lay down a new law for us to keep. We are not invited to attain a right standing with Him through obedience to any religious code. Paul wrote in Phil. 3: 21, “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.” The gospel is non-legalistic. It is an evangel, God’s good news to a sinful race.
In Rom. 1:2 Paul indicated that God had promised the gospel beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures. Here in vs. 21 he expanded the statement to include the Law as well as the prophets. Through both, God had borne witness to his saving acts in Jesus Christ. The gospel was no innovation.
Thus Paul shared with other early Christians the conviction that the O.T. pointed forward to the coming of Jesus Christ. The great promises of the O.T. have their fulfillment in the N.T.
In vs. 22 Paul affirmed that God made available to men a right relationship to Himself through faith in Jesus Christ. All men need to believe in Him, “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” This latter clause is the verdict Paul reached regarding the Gentiles in Rom. 1: 18-32 and the Jews in 2: 1 to 3: 20, and he repeated it here.
Since we all are far from what God intended for us to be, “we fall short of the glory of God.” God’s original intent was that we would be for His glory and we would reflect His glory. God bestowed a great honor on us---to be made in His image and reflect His glory—but our sin and the absence of righteousness means we have completely missed the mark of what God intended.
Amazingly, even though we missed the mark, we are justified freely. Justification is far more than a pardon. A pardon frees offender from the penalty of the law, but it does not change the person.
Pardon is necessary for justification, but justification does more than just remove the penalty; it also removes the sin that brought the penalty.
We are not justified automatically. Receiving justification is dependent on faith, but it is offered freely. Classical Greek writers understood grace as something freely done without expecting anything in return. But when God’s grace was spoken of in the N.T. it added an element unknown to the secular man---a gift freely offered to an enemy.
The whole point about God and man is this---that when man appears before God he is anything but innocent; he is utterly guilty; and yet God, in His amazing mercy, treats him, reckons him as if he were an innocent man. That is what justification means.
When Paul says that, “God justifies the ungodly,” he means that God, in His incredible mercy, treats the ungodly as if he had been a good man. That is what shocked the Jews to the core of their being. To them to treat the bad man as if he was a good man was the sign of a wicked judge. Pro 17:15 says, “He that justifieth the wicked is an abomination to the Lord.” Again, Exodus 23: 7, says, “I will not justify the wicked.”
But Paul says that that is precisely what God does. But how can I know what God is like? I know that God is like that because Jesus said so.
Jesus came to tell us that God loves us, bad as we are. He came to tell us that we may be sinners---we are sinners---but we are still dear to God. Now note, when we discover that, and believe that, it changes our whole relationship to God. We are conscious of our sin, but we are no longer in terror; we are no longer estranged; penitent and broken-hearted we come to God, like a sorry child coming to his mother, and we know that the God we come to is love. That is what justification by faith in Jesus Christ means.
It means we are in a right relationship with God, because we believe with all our hearts that what Jesus told us about God is true. We are no longer terrorized strangers from an angry God. We are children, erring children, trusting in their Father’s love for forgiveness. And we would never have known that if Jesus had not come to live and to die to tell us so. And we only know it when we trust absolutely that what Jesus said about God is true.
Paul used three metaphors to show what God has freely given us. We have already seen one metaphor: a picture from a court of law in which we stand before God justified. The second metaphor Paul used came from the slave market: redemption.
To redeem a slave meant paying as set price to free a person from the slave market, free never to be sold again. That is exactly what Christ did for us on the cross when He redeemed us. We were slaves to sin, and we were powerless to free ourselves. Christ alone could----and did—buy us out of slavery to sin, and we will never be slaves to sin again. Let us never forget that though salvation is offered freely, it came at a great cost. Our redemption came in Christ Jesus. The price He paid was His own life.
God presented Jesus in the slave market of sin as our propitiation. Now there’s a word we don’t use every day! But it is a word full of incredible meaning and joy for us who believe. Propitiation is the third metaphor Paul used, taken from the practice of offering sacrifices.
The classical Greek language used the term for the offering of a sacrifice to a god to appease the offended god, make him favorable to the person, and even buy his love. There is no sense of that in the N.T, and we do better to understand the O.T. use of the word.
In the O.T., a sacrifice was offered to bring about reconciliation with God. The sacrifice covered the sin, which stood between God and man. With the sin covered, the penalty was removed and God’s wrath was turned aside.
When the sacrificial blood was sprinkled, the altar moved from being a place of judgment to a place of mercy (the mercy seat). Jesus was both the sacrifice and the mercy seat. Through His sacrifice, He could offer mercy because justice was satisfied. Jesus is our propitiation, the sacrifice by which the penalty for sin is removed and God’s wrath is turned aside. Propitiation means a ransoming, a redeeming, and a liberating. It means that man was in the power, the grip, the dominion of sin, and that Jesus Christ alone can free him from sin.
The power for propitiation to take place was in the blood of Jesus. Blood was always involved in sacrifice, and Jesus provided the ultimate, final sacrifice when His righteous, innocent blood was shed. We experience propitiation when we place faith in His blood. The blood does us no good if we do not accept it and act upon it in faith.
Why didn’t God deal with the sin problem earlier, before the death of Jesus? Had God previously condoned sin? God has always hated sin and His wrath was against sinful humanity, but He had shown restraint in dealing with it. God held back until the time was right. Even though the O.T. period was a period when God’s justice was not fully satisfied, the matter was always on God’s mind.
God looked forward to the satisfaction of His justice at the cross of Christ. It makes no difference to God whether He saves sinners before or after the cross. The effects of the cross are not bound by time. God may have –passed over the sins previously committed, but He did not pass over them forever. Sin was never condoned, but it was paid for.
If people thought God was indifferent to sin, they could do so no longer. By presenting to the world the crucified Christ, God was able to demonstrate His righteousness. God’s righteousness calls for justice, but God’s love would not allow Him to leave us to the fate of our sins. So, in this one act----the death of Christ----God maintained His own righteousness and brought righteousness within reach of us all. All that remains for God to declare us righteous is for us to accept God’s work on our behalf through faith in Jesus.
Finally Paul says of God that God did all this because He is, and accepts as just, all who believe in Jesus. Paul never in his life said a more startling thing than this. “It is the supreme paradox of the gospel.”
Think what it means! It means that God is just and accepts the sinner as a just man. The natural thing to say, the inevitable thing to say, would be, “God is just, and somehow, in that incredible and miraculous grace that Jesus came to bring to me, He accepts the sinner, not as a criminal, but as a son whom He still loves.
Now what is the essence of all this? Where is the difference between all this and the old way of the law? The basic difference is this---the way of obedience to the law is concerned with what a man can do for himself; the way of grace is concerned with what God can do, and has done for man.
Paul is insisting that nothing that we can ever do can win for us the forgiveness of God: only what God has done for us can win that: therefore, the way to a right relationship with God lies, not in a frenzied, desperate, doomed attempt to win acquittal by our performance; it lies in the humble, penitent acceptance of the love and the grace which God offers us in Jesus Christ.
To sum up, anybody can have right standing with God as a free gift of His undeserved favor, through the ransom provided in Christ Jesus.
From bondage to freedom, from guilt to innocence. God demanded the atonement and provided it. Paul now came to his conclusion: we are justified by faith and faith alone.
PLEASE TURN TO ROMANS 4.
PLEASE READ ROMANS 4: 1-3.
Throughout Romans Paul contrasted two approaches to religion: the way of the law and the way of faith. In Ch. 3 he emphasized the strong differences between the two ways. In 3:21 he stated that the way of faith is being witnessed by the law and the prophets.
In his introduction to the letter, he quoted one of the key O.T. texts from Habakkuk 2:4, “The just shall live by faith.” In Romans 4 Paul used as examples two of the greatest men of the O.T.---Abraham and David. In Rom. 3: 27 he had just made the point that the way of law leads to human boasting.
He began Ch. 4 with a question, “What then can we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, has found?” Abraham was the revered forefather of the Jews. The Jews took great pride in being children of Abraham. Thus Paul used pertaining to the flesh.
Paul later argued in Rom 4: 12 that anyone with a faith like Abraham’s was a child of Abraham.
Paul’s question in vs. 1 was like asking, “How was Abraham justified?” Paul said that Abraham showed none of the pride and boasting of someone justified by works. The key biblical text for Paul was Gen. 15:6, which he quoted in vs. 3: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.”
In Gen. 15: 1-5 God made great promises to Abraham whose response is in vs. 6. Paul considered this a clear statement of being justified by faith. Three things characterize this key text. (1) The issue was how to be righteous before God. (2) This was not merited by one’s ability to become righteous enough to be acceptable to God but is based on faith. (3) Being justified is being counted or reckoned righteous by God. The word for counted is a bookkeeping term meaning to credit one’s account. This could be earned wages, or it could be a gift. Paul was thinking of a free gift of God’s grace. Although people are sinners, God gives the status as righteous to those who have faith in the Savior. Gen. 15:6 says that Abraham’s faith enabled God to count him as righteous.
It was not the fact that Abraham had meticulously performed the demands of the law that put him into this special relationship with God; it was his complete trust in God, his complete acceptance in God, his complete willingness to abandon his life to God. That for Paul was faith, and it was that faith of Abraham, which made God regard Abraham as a good man..
The theology of Paul’s contemporaries claimed that Abraham was justified by his obedience to God, especially his willingness to be circumcised and to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. They interpreted Gen. 15:6 in light of Genesis 17 and 22, and stressed Abraham’s obedience rather than his faith.
A Jewish writer from between the testaments says, “Was not Abraham found faithful when tested, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness? Of course, obedience and faith are closely related, but faith is the foundation for acceptance before God.
The parable is a perfect example of the difference between claiming to be justified by works and by faith. The boastful Pharisee illustrated a person who claimed a righteousness of his own. The tax collector confessed his sins with faith that God would forgive him.
To Paul’s opponents, it was scandalous to claim that God declares righteous the ungodly. Recall the courtroom scene in which all stand guilty before God. We deserve condemnation, but two factors make possible the miracle of guilty sinners being accepted as righteous. One is that the sinless Savior took the judgment we deserve. The other is that believers open their lives to God’s grace and power through faith. For, as we noted in the previous lesson, the faith that saves begins with belief but includes repentance and commitment.
PLEASE TURN TO ROMANS 5.
4. PLEASE READ ROMANS 5: 1-2.
For four chapters, Paul explained in detail our need for salvation and the way we receive salvation: justification by faith in Christ Jesus. In Ch. 5 Paul moved ahead to examine the results of that salvation.
Therefore---based on all that has been said in the first four chapters, which is that we have been declared righteous by faith---here is what we received as the benefits of salvation Paul did not explicitly point this out as a benefit of salvation, but it is certainly worth noting: One of the benefits of salvation is that we have been declared righteous.
What a beautiful thing to be called righteous by a righteous God! God declares it---states it as a fact---that we are not longer under the wrath brought about by our sin. We are freed from the penalty, power and consequences of sin and freed to be seen as righteous in God’s eyes.
One benefit that Paul does explicitly note as a result of our salvation is that we have peace with God. The verb form of peace means to bind things together that have previously been separated. In this case, peace with God means that we were once separated from God but we are now brought to Him in a new relationship.
Peace in this case is far more than inner tranquility. This peace is both objective and external. It is expressed in our relationship with God whereby the hostility caused by our sin is removed. With the hostility of sin removed we are no longer under God’s wrath and have peace. Praise God that the threat of hostility---the judgment of God’s wrath has been removed.
There is another benefit Paul noted: We have obtained access. There are two word pictures that help us see the type of access we have gained. First, the word access includes he idea of introducing someone to royalty.
Someone who knows the king helps another person become properly attired and then introduces him so that he may have access to the king. Isn’t that what Jesus does for us? He cleanses us with His blood, clothes us with His righteousness, and then brings us into the full favor of God the Father.
The second word picture behind access comes from later Greek usage. Access was used to describe the arrival of a ship; it referred to a harbor or haven. We are safe in Jesus, the One who is our haven. He is the One who makes us safe and secure and brings us into the presence of the Father.
We now have open access to God’s grace, which is found in the presence of God. When do we receive it? We have it now; we have obtained. The tense behind this verb phrase indicates something already received and something we possess permanently. The grace that saves us is the grace in which we stand. God’s grace is an integral part of our justification.
Grace brings us to God and it is the new spiritual environment we live in. The same grace that saves us will help us to stand moment-by-moment, day-by-day. Let’s admit it: We don’t deserve forgiveness and justification. Even as Christians we still sin. But God’s grace never runs out. We never stand outside His grace. As God forgives, let us forgive ourselves, and live as freed, forgiven children of God.
This position in God’s grace and forgiveness gives us great cause to rejoice. With all the blessings God has graciously given us now, we rejoice because these blessings are only a part of the blessings awaiting us when we are face to face with Christ. What a great hope we have.
The hope before us is the hope of the glory of God. We were created for God’s glory, and, as we noted earlier, our sins have caused us to fall short of that glory. But now, with all the rich provisions God has given us—access to Him, grace, and justification—we can now begin to reflect that glory. We can move toward the goal that God had in mind in creation: our lives bringing glory to Him. We can bring glory to Him now as we live in Him, and we have blessed hope that one day, when we are delivered from these bodies of sin, we will fully and completely be for the glory of God.
In Heb. 4: 16 the writer of Hebrews picked up on this and added: “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
Justification through Christ is the only way to possess righteousness, peace, and access to God, grace, joy, and hope. It truly is a wondrous thing that God freely gives us these benefits. And all we have to do to receive these benefits is to trust and believe in Him.
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The Law makes sin known, but can’t save.
In Scripture, justification is the opposite of condemnation. It is final and irreversible.
Believes now share the same righteous state as the risen Christ Himself, with whom they are united now and forever. (2 Corinthians 5: 21)
Sacrifice does not make God love us. The opposite is true---God’s love caused Him to offer His Son. John 3: 16.
Faith is the instrumental cause, not the ultimate cause of justification.
The Jews received the written law from Moses, and Gentiles had the works of the law written on their hearts, so that both are accountable to God. There is no defense against the guilty verdict God pronounces on the entire human race.